Your Tap Water Doesn't Need a $40 Filter — It Needs This $0 Charcoal

[00:00:00]There is a ritual in millions of American kitchens, and you probably performed it this morning.

[00:00:05]You open the refrigerator. You take out the plastic pitcher. You fill your glass through the little filter cartridge because everyone knows the tap water tastes like a swimming pool, and the pitcher fixes it.

[00:00:17]And every couple of months, the little light blinks or the water starts tasting off again, and you go buy another cartridge. 8, 10, 12 dollars, six times a year, forever.

[00:00:30]The pitcher was 30 or 40 dollars, but the pitcher was never the product. The cartridge is the product. You did not buy a filter. You subscribed to one.

[00:00:41]Now, let me tell you what is inside that cartridge you keep buying.

[00:00:45]Crack one open, I have, and what pours out is black granules, carbon, burned plant matter processed and packaged.

[00:00:55]That is the entire magic ingredient. The filter industry, a multi-billion dollar industry, is selling you charcoal in a plastic shell. And charcoal, the real thing, the thing that does the actual work of making water taste clean, falls out of every wood fire on earth, free, and has been used to sweeten water by my people and every old people on every continent for thousands of years before the first cartridge was molded. My name is Frank Redhawk.

[00:01:26]I grew up on the reservation out in the high desert where the water came from wells and creeks and rain barrels, and none of it ever met a cartridge. And the drinking jar in my grandmother's kitchen held the cleanest tasting water I have ever drunk because sitting at the bottom of that jar, doing quiet work all day, was a fist-sized piece of charcoal from our own stove.

[00:01:49]Today, I'm going to show you exactly how that works, how to do it in your kitchen tonight with your tap water, and how the whole system costs you nothing for the rest of your life.

[00:01:59]And stay with me because partway through I'm going to tell you what fancy boutiques in this country are charging for the identical piece of burned wood.

[00:02:08]The number is going to make you laugh.

[00:02:10]And then it is going to make you a little angry. First, let me show you why charcoal works because it is one of the most beautiful pieces of natural engineering there is.

[00:02:20]And once you see it, you will never look at a burned log the same way.

[00:02:24]When wood burns slowly with limited air, the water and the volatile compounds cook out of it.

[00:02:30]And what remains is a carbon skeleton, >> [clears throat] >> the wood's entire internal structure, all its cells and vessels and pores preserved in almost pure carbon.

[00:02:42]The numbers are hard to believe.

[00:02:44]A single gram of good charcoal, a piece the size of a pencil eraser, contains an internal surface area of hundreds of square meters.

[00:02:54]Unfold all of the microscopic pores and tunnels in one handful of charcoal, and you are holding several football fields of surface folded into something that fits in your palm. And that surface grabs things.

[00:03:07]The process is called adsorption, with a D.

[00:03:11]And it means molecules in the water stick to the carbon surface as they drift past and stay stuck.

[00:03:18]What sticks best?

[00:03:20]Exactly the things that make tap water taste and smell bad, chlorine and its compounds, the earthy, musty organics, the faint plastic and metallic notes, the swimming pool ghost that follows city water everywhere.

[00:03:35]Water passes, the offenders stay behind in the pores, and what comes out the other side tastes like water is supposed to taste, like nothing at all.

[00:03:45]Which is the taste of clean. That is what your cartridge does.

[00:03:49]That is all your cartridge does for taste.

[00:03:53]The industry calls it activated carbon, and to be fair, their version is processed with steam or chemicals to open even more pores. It is stronger, ounce for ounce, than homemade.

[00:04:05]But the difference is capacity, not kind.

[00:04:09]A bigger piece of honest charcoal does the same job as a smaller pinch of activated, the same way a bigger bucket carries the same water as a fancier one.

[00:04:19]And your fireplace makes the bigger piece for free every time you burn a log.

[00:04:25]Here is the first method, and it is so simple you will not believe it until you taste it. I call it the drinking jar, because that is what it was called in my grandmother's kitchen. Take a piece of hardwood charcoal from a real wood fire, a solid black chunk, fist-sized or a little smaller, from oak, maple, hickory, mesquite, any hardwood. Not a briquette, never a briquette. Those are sawdust glued together with binders and lighter chemicals, and they belong nowhere near your drinking water.

[00:04:56]A real piece of burned hardwood, hard and black and light, that rings almost like ceramic when you tap two pieces together.

[00:05:04]Rinse it under the tap until the water runs clear off it, scrubbing with a brush, no soap. Then drop it in a pot of water and boil it for 10 minutes. This sterilizes every surface and blows the loose dust out of the pores.

[00:05:18]Let it cool.

[00:05:19]Now place it in a glass pitcher or a big jar, fill the jar with tap water, and put it in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, taste. The chlorine is gone.

[00:05:30]The plastic ghost is gone. The water is soft-tasting, round, clean. The water your pitcher cartridge sells you, made by a piece of your own fire.

[00:05:42]The charcoal sits in the jar and works around the clock. You just keep refilling with tap water, and the jar does the rest. One piece handles a household's drinking jar for about a month. And I will show you in a minute how to recharge it and what to do with it when it retires.

[00:05:59]Total cost so far? Zero. Now the boutique story I promised and then the rest of the system.

[00:06:06]In Japan they have used exactly this method for centuries with a beautiful white oak charcoal called Binchotan.

[00:06:13]And right now in this country, wellness boutiques and specialty stores sell imported Binchotan sticks for your water pitcher wrapped in nice paper with instructions for 10, 15, even 20 dollars per stick.

[00:06:29]Per stick?

[00:06:30]It is a piece of burned wood. It is the same carbon chemistry sitting in your fireplace ash pan tonight.

[00:06:38]The modern world will always find a way to sell you back the thing your grandmother threw nothing away to keep.

[00:06:44]And the price of forgetting is apparently 20 dollars a stick replaced quarterly. Before I show you the recharge trick that keeps one piece of charcoal working for months and the bigger build for households that want to filter by the gallon, I need to tell you something.

[00:07:01]Everything I teach on this channel and the methods that never made it to camera, I wrote down.

[00:07:08]All of it.

[00:07:09]62 methods, nine sections in the order you should do them with the materials and the real dollar amounts written next to each one.

[00:07:19]The whole water section works like today.

[00:07:22]The drinking jar, the drip filter, the rain barrel, the clay jar that keeps water cold with no power, the right way to boil and store, and the other eight sections carry the cooling, the heating, the food, the pests, and the cleaning the same way.

[00:07:40]It is called the native household manual.

[00:07:44]And it costs less than five of the cartridges you are never buying again.

[00:07:49]The link is in the pinned comment, but do not leave yet because the recharge method is the part that makes this system permanent instead of clever.

[00:07:57]And almost nobody teaches it.

[00:08:00]Here it is.

[00:08:02]Charcoal is not consumed by filtering.

[00:08:04]It fills up.

[00:08:06]Every pore that grabs a chlorine molecule is a pore that is now holding it.

[00:08:12]After a few weeks, the surfaces are crowded. The water stops improving.

[00:08:16]And a cartridge at this stage goes in the trash and gets replaced for $10.

[00:08:22]Your charcoal does not.

[00:08:24]You recharge it two ways.

[00:08:27]The weekly refresh.

[00:08:29]Every week or so, take the piece out of the jar and boil it for 10 minutes.

[00:08:34]The rolling heat drives off much of what the pores have adsorbed and re-sterilizes the surface.

[00:08:41]Dry it in the sun for an afternoon.

[00:08:43]Sunlight is the old disinfectant and the pores release best when bone dry.

[00:08:49]And drop it back in the jar.

[00:08:51]Boil, sun, return.

[00:08:54]Two minutes of your attention a week.

[00:08:56]The monthly retirement. After 4 to 6 weeks of service, even a refreshed piece is tired, so it retires.

[00:09:04]And here is the part my grandmother would insist I tell you.

[00:09:08]It retires into the garden.

[00:09:11]Crushed charcoal in soil is one of the oldest soil improvements on Earth.

[00:09:17]It holds water and nutrients in those same million pores and feeds the ground for years.

[00:09:23]The piece that cleaned your water all month goes on to feed your tomatoes for a decade.

[00:09:28]Nothing is thrown away.

[00:09:31]The fire makes a new piece whenever you burn a log and the loop closes.

[00:09:36]Which is what the old systems always do.

[00:09:39]And what a subscription is specifically designed never to do. If your household drinks faster than a jar, scale up to the drip filter.

[00:09:48]The one from my water purification video. And it is in the manual with diagrams.

[00:09:54]A bucket or a big cut bottle layered from the bottom, rinsed gravel, clean sand, and a thick middle layer of your charcoal crushed to pea size.

[00:10:05]Pour tap water in the top, collected below. The sand polishes, the charcoal sweetens, and the first two batches get poured on the garden to clear the harmless dust.

[00:10:16]That build handles gallons at a time and costs at most the price of a bag of sand. And if you have no fireplace at all, apartment, condo, all-electric house, you still have three doors into this system.

[00:10:30]The first is the grill.

[00:10:32]One bag of real hardwood lump charcoal, the kind sold for barbecue with exactly two words on the ingredient list, hardwood charcoal, costs seven or eight dollars and holds a year of drinking jar pieces plus a summer of cooking.

[00:10:48]Check the bag.

[00:10:50]If it says lump hardwood, it is fire-made charcoal, the honest article.

[00:10:56]If it says briquettes, easy light, or match ready, walk past it. That is glue and accelerant shaped like charcoal, and it is for neither your water nor, frankly, your food.

[00:11:09]The second door is any friend or neighbor with a wood stove who is currently throwing away a lifetime supply of what the boutique sells for $20 a stick. And the third is one evening at any campground or fire pit.

[00:11:22]A single good hardwood fire allowed to burn down and then starved of air.

[00:11:28]Coals scooped into a lidded metal can and left to cool sealed will hand you a coffee can of drinking jar charcoal that lasts the year.

[00:11:38]My grandfather made his in exactly that way, in a lard can with a tight lid, set beside the stove. Coals in, lid on, air out, and the fire's leftovers came out the next morning as hard ringing poor perfect charcoal instead of ash.

[00:11:55]The can was never washed and never empty.

[00:11:58]And I did not understand until I was grown that I had been watching a small factory. I will tell you one more thing about my grandmother's drinking jar, because there is a detail I left out.

[00:12:09]The jar sat on a shelf by the door, glass with a cloth over the top and the black stone.

[00:12:15]That is what the small children called the charcoal, the black stone, resting at the bottom like something sleeping.

[00:12:23]Visitors from town would drink from that jar on a hot day.

[00:12:27]And more than once I watched one of them stop and look into the glass, surprised, and ask what kind of water it was.

[00:12:36]"Well water," she would say, which was true and was not the answer.

[00:12:41]The answer was at the bottom of the jar.

[00:12:44]She never explained it unless asked directly. And when I finally asked her why, she said something I have thought about my whole life.

[00:12:53]She said, "If I tell them, they will want to buy one somewhere.

[00:12:57]Let them ask the jar."

[00:13:00]She was right, of course.

[00:13:02]40 years later, the stores did figure out how to sell it, $10 a stick, wrapped in paper.

[00:13:09]The jar was free the entire time. Now the honest part, because I will not sell you a method by hiding its edges.

[00:13:17]Today is about taste and smell, chlorine odors, the organic off notes.

[00:13:23]And for that job, homemade charcoal is genuinely excellent and genuinely free.

[00:13:29]But, here the boundaries.

[00:13:31]If your home has lead pipes or lead solder, or your water report shows heavy metals, that is a different problem.

[00:13:39]Metals need certified filtration designed for them, and no jar of charcoal, and frankly, not the standard pitcher cartridge, either, is the right tool for that fight.

[00:13:51]Hard water, the white scale on your kettle, is minerals, and charcoal does not soften it. Nothing in a jar does.

[00:14:00]And if your water comes from a well or a wild source, rather than a treated city line, then taste is the second question, not the first. The filter and boil system from my purification video comes first, always. City tap water in this country is already microbiologically safe when it leaves the plant.

[00:14:20]What we fixed today is everything the pipes and the chlorine do to it between the plant and your glass.

[00:14:27]Know which problem you have. The old knowledge always started there. So, count it up. The pitcher, $30 The cartridges, $8 6 to 12 times a year, every year, forever. Call it $60 to $100 a year per household for burned plant matter in a plastic shell.

[00:14:50]The drinking jar, a piece of your own fire, a weekly boil, a monthly trip to the tomatoes, $0 and better tasting water in a glass jar instead of a plastic pitcher.

[00:15:04]Multiply your cartridge money by the 20 or 30 years ahead of you, and you are looking at two or three thousand dollars for something the fire gives you free every winter evening you were already enjoying. If what you learned today is the kind of knowledge you want in your house, the manual is there.

[00:15:23]The Native Household Manual.

[00:15:25]62 methods, 200 pages, written the way I would explain it if we were standing at your kitchen sink. The water, the cooling, the heating, the food, the pests, the cleaning, all of it. In the order you should do them, with the savings written next to each one.

[00:15:43]The link is in the pinned comment.

[00:15:46]Read one section.

[00:15:47]Do one method this weekend.

[00:15:50]Then pour two glasses. One from the tap.

[00:15:53]One from the jar.

[00:15:55]And hand them to somebody without saying which is which.

[00:15:58]The look on their face is the whole review. Tell me in the comments what your water tastes like where you live.

[00:16:04]The chlorine, the metal, the musty well, whatever it is.

[00:16:08]And how much you have spent on cartridges over the years if you dare to do that math in public.

[00:16:14]And when you set up the jar tonight, come back tomorrow and tell me about the first glass.

[00:16:20]I read every single one of these. Every one.

[00:16:23]Next time I am going to show you the native way to keep drinks and food cold outside all day with no cooler and no ice.

[00:16:31]The clay and cloth methods my people used through desert summers working at your next cookout for about $2.

[00:16:39]If today's jar surprised you, wait until you feel that one.

[00:16:44]Until then, pull a piece from the fire, boil it, drop it in the jar, and remember the industry did not invent the filter.

[00:16:52]It invented the cartridge, the part that runs out.

[00:16:56]The filter is older than the pyramids.

[00:16:59]It is sitting in your fireplace tonight.

[00:17:01]And it never sends a bill.